To Gaston de Saporta   11 October 1877

Down.

Octr. 11. 1877.

Dear Sir

I thank you very sincerely for communicating to me your discovery, & it is a most interesting one—1 It is especially important at the present time when several naturalists have declared that development occurs quite suddenly at intervals— Thus Mr Le Conte in N. America urges that even new families or orders are developed within an extremely short period:2 Whenever I read such views I think of your observations on the Tertiary European Flora, and on those of Dr. Neumayr on the Freshwater Shells in the Congerian beds, & then I return to my old faith that such views are erroneous—3 I saw lately in a journal that you have discovered a true fern in a Silurian formation4   If my dear old friend Lyell had been alive how he would have rejoiced over these two great steps in the history of the vegetable kingdom—5

With cordial good wishes, & a firm belief that you will make many more important discoveries— | I remain Dear Sir. | Yours faithfully— | Charles Darwin.

Copy

1
Saporta’s letter has not been found. He possibly sent information about the discovery of a leaf of a gingko-like species in the Permian deposits of the Urals, a topic he discussed in more detail in December (see letter from Gaston de Saporta, 16 December 1877 and n. 26).
2
In his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1875, John Lawrence Le Conte had criticised the notion that change occurred by numerous successive slight modifications, arguing instead that more rapid change occurred in those species that were in a ‘condition of evolution’ (Le Conte 1875, pp. 485–6).
3
Saporta had mentioned the gradual transition of plant forms from the Tertiary period to the present in his letter of 2 September 1876 (see Correspondence vol. 24). In March, Melchior Neumayr had sent CD the essay on the Congerian Beds that he had written with Carl Maria Paul (see letter to Melchior Neumayr, 9 March 1877 and n. 1). The Congerian Beds were a geological stratum characterised by the presence of fossil shells of the bivalve mollusc genus Congeria.
4
Saporta’s discovery of a fern in the Silurian schists (or slates) of Angers, France, was presented at a meeting of the Paris Académie des sciences on 5 September 1877, and reported in the Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences (Saporta 1877).
5
Charles Lyell had died in 1875. In the 1830s, he had subdivided the Tertiary rocks of the Paris Basin on the basis of a statistical analysis of their fossils; the rocks at the top (the Newer and Older Pliocene) have a high percentage of fossils of living mollusc species, the rocks in the middle (the Miocene) have many fewer fossils of living forms, while the lowest rocks (the Eocene) have no fossils of extant species (Lyell 1830–3, vol. 3).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11179,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11179